


Weak Spot

by battle_cat



Series: Together [57]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Max and Furiosa Fucking Shit Up Together, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Torture, Whump, canon-typical amounts of murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 02:21:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5988850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A scavenging run takes a dangerous turn when Max and Furiosa get taken prisoner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weak Spot

**Author's Note:**

> This fic now has a sequel called [Old Wounds](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7703569), that picks up directly where this story ends.

Furiosa does not believe in gods, self-declared or otherwise. And if there is any higher logic to the universe, it seems only to be a cruel one. But luck…every soldier believes in luck. And as a dozen guns click around them in the dark, she thinks that theirs has just run out.

 

There are always thing missing, between what could be traded and scavenged and jerry-rigged and grown. Parts, metals, chemicals, medical supplies. Things the ruined cities had been full of Before. And so even though the cities are dangerous and toxic, an occasional scavenging run by two well-armed road warriors is worth it.

They make it all the way through the enormous building, so desiccated only the fading red cross on the roof marks it as having once been a hospital. It’s been mostly picked clean, but they find a few choice items that Janey had asked them to look for, so it seems almost worth the risk of being in this place where every one of ten thousand windows around them could be a sniper post.

They could have doubled back and gone out the entrance they came in, but it’s getting late and this one is right in front of them and they’ve already gotten turned around twice in the massive building. They test the boards covering the artillery shell hole in the floor, and they seem solid, and they _are_ solid, right up until the spot in the middle where they aren’t.

 

They both crash through the hole in the floor into darkness, and it’s only a one-story drop but the floor below is concrete. He manages to twist enough that he lands on his side and not his bad knee, but it still drives the breath out of him.

In the second it takes him to recover he hears the guns that click around them and realizes the boards hadn’t been a flaw, but a trap.

_Fuck._

A soft hiss of fire as torches light up around them, enough for him to know they’re surrounded as figures emerge out of the shadows. He counts eight that he can see, and three or four behind them by the sound. Rough gaunt-faced men, toothless and scarred, but he notes strong hands and steady gaits, and every one of them is armed.

Twelve, he thinks. Too many to fight without an advantage, even for the two of them together. When he flicks a glance to Furiosa he sees she knows it too.

“Say nothing,” she whispers as their captors haul them to their feet. Someone jabs a shotgun barrel in his back and he puts his hands up.

“What’ve we got here?” The one who seems to be in charge has two front teeth missing.

A rough hand on the back of his neck. “These two are property of the Immortan,” someone says from behind him.

“Are they now? ‘Splain how she got such a shine thing as this.” The gap-toothed man makes a grab for Furiosa’s prosthetic arm and she jerks it out of reach instinctively, the metal fingers curling into a fist. The man behind her presses a cocked gun against her skull.

“Search them,” Gap-Tooth snaps. “Take that off her.”

He barely pays attention to the rough fingers pulling off his jacket, digging through his pockets, extracting weapons and hard-won tools anyone in the Wasteland would kill for, or to the hands that pull his behind his back and tie them there with coarse rope. His eyes are on Furiosa, her face unreadable as one of the men unbuckles the prosthetic and strips it off along with the leather armor under it, and he doesn’t know why it makes him so _angry_ ; it’s just metal, but it feels like a violation to watch them playing with it.

Their search involves a lot of grabbing her in places where she couldn’t possibly hide a weapon, and it makes the blood pound in his ears, but there’s nothing on her face but cold detachment.

Their captors are chattering around them. “I heard he’s not Immortan anymore,” one says from somewhere behind him. “Heard someone snuffed him.” A puff of stale breath next to Max’s face. “That true?”

She gave him one command, and he sticks to it.

“I heard his _wives_ run the place now,” another one pipes up, and they all whoop with laughter at the absurdity of it.

“Nah.” Gap-Tooth has Furiosa’s arm now, and he’s looking her up and down in a way that makes Max’s fists clench behind his back. “I heard it’s just one wife. Heard she rules with an iron fist.” He waggles the prosthetic at her, and there’s another roar of laughter.

Max is still trying to work out whether they really have no idea who they’ve captured, or whether they do know and are taunting them, when Furiosa snarls, “Blasphemy! The Immortan lives, his armies know where we are, and they’re coming to shred you all!”

Gap-Tooth cackles, but Max notices a few of his mates shifting uneasily. Could they really not know?

Gap-Tooth smiles his broken-window smile. “I don’t think anyone’s coming for you.”

 

They are somewhere in the basement level. Max tries to remember all the twists and turns, and he’s sure they double back at some point, but the walls are all the same cracked yellow tile and it’s hard to keep track, and they push his head down when he tries to look up for too long. He can only sneak fleeting glances at Furiosa, her arms tied behind her back above the elbow, her face closed and hard.

They finally go through a heavy metal door into a space with an inner room and an outer one. There are lamps in here that look like kerosene, dirty but enough to see. The air crackles with impending violence.

“Separate them,” Gap-Tooth says. “Him first.”

Three of them shove him into the back room while another stays with a gun trained on Furiosa out front. He keeps an eye on her just long enough to see the man shove her down against the wall before the door closes in his face.

It’s one of _those_ back rooms—whatever its original purpose was, it’s now used for torture. He has a split second to register it, then a blow from behind drops him to his knees. The floor in here is hard tile over concrete and he grimaces at the shock to his bad knee.

Gap-Tooth has followed them into the back room. He hooks a grimy hand under Max’s jaw and pulls his face up to look at him. He’s strong, and Max thinks he’s just smart enough to be dangerous.

“Pretty sure you’re from the Citadel, no matter who’s in charge now,” he says. “Whole lotta water and crops in that place, ain’t there?”

He’s talking to the man with a knee in Max’s back and a handful of his shirt in his fist, who grunts in assent somewhere behind him.

“Word is, there’s a secret way in,” Gap-Tooth says. “Word is that’s how Joe took it. Wouldn’t know anything about that, wouldya?”

Max doesn’t, but they won’t believe that anyway, so he grits his teeth and says nothing.

“Have it your way.” His fingers unclench from around Max’s jaw and he heads for the door. “Call me if anything interesting happens,” he says to his crew as he heads for the door. “And keep your hands off her. She’s for later.” And as he says it he looks back at Max and _winks_.

He’s on his feet without knowing how, lunging and growling as Gap-Tooth cackles and slams the door in his face. Someone punches him in the mouth and someone else hits him from behind and then he’s on the ground.

They beat him, blow after blow with fists and feet and what feels like a metal pipe, and there’s nothing to do but curl up in a ball and take it. He tries to be quiet, not letting it show what hurts the most, but when the pipe comes down on the side of his bad knee he screams, unable to stop himself as the bolt of pain shoots from hip to toes.

“Think we found this one’s weak spot.” Fingers explore the brace, then latch onto either side of his kneecap and squeeze, sending a railroad spike of pain up through his leg. He grits his teeth but can’t help the ragged howl that comes out of him. His vision grays at the edges.

 

Furiosa sits against the wall where the squinty-eyed man with the gun shoved her. Clenches her jaw against the sounds coming through the door behind her, fists and feet hitting flesh, and the small bitten-off whimpers that she knows too well are the sound of someone trying not to scream.

Then he does scream, and it goes through her like a knife. She doesn’t want to think about what they’re doing to him to make that sound.

_Focus. Find an advantage._

Squinty-Eyes is leering at her over the barrel of the ancient shotgun in his hand. She shifts her position a little against the wall.

“Uh-uh.” He waggles the gun at her.

“If you were gonna shoot me, you’d have done it already,” she says, making sure to look him in the eye. “You want something.”

Her calm, steady gaze seems to be unnerving him a little, and she focuses on holding it even as Max makes an awful sound in the room behind her.

_Don’t listen. Focus on this._

“S-secret way into the Citadel,” Squinty-Eyes says. “Boss says—”

“Does he now? And you think you’re gonna get it by beating it out of him?” She’s spitballing, trying to find something, anything that will get a reaction. “I found that fool out in the wastes. He can fight, but he doesn’t know shit about the Citadel.”

Behind the door, Max wails. She grits her teeth.

Squinty-Eyes squints a little harder. “That’s…that’s what someone trying to trick us would say,” he mutters, almost to himself. 

“Oh, I don’t need to trick you. Immortan’s coming to shred your ass.” And she sees it, _yes_ , the flicker of fear she wants, the fear that will turn their attention back to her.

“You really think he’d send two of his soldiers all the way out here without knowing exactly where they are and when they’re supposed to return? Without reinforcements nearby?” she drawls, and she sees the idea catch in his head, sees him shove it away.

“Do you know what he does to people who damage his property?” She keeps her eyes on his and sees him shift uncomfortably, just the tiniest bit. “You’re not getting out of this with a quick death. I’ve seen thieves dragged behind his car til their skin comes off. Hacked up alive by War Boys for sport. Or maybe he’ll just fuck you.”

“Shut up.” He takes a lunging step toward her with the gun and she thinks _almost_.

“Wives are for breeding but prisoners are for entertainment. I’ll make sure you get recommended for the task. Maybe I’ll watch.”

He shoves the barrel of the gun against her cheek, and she cranes her neck so she can still look him in the eye. “Bet you scream like a little—”

He reverses the gun to hit her and she grabs her chance, smashes a hard kick into his knee that knocks him onto the floor howling. His crotch is out of kicking reach but she rolls and spins and lands one on the spot on his shin that makes him yelp, curls up and slams a knee into his nose when he lunges for her. Blood splatters.

 

Somewhere through the haze of pain, Max hears pounding on the door.

“What the hell, mate?”

He breathes through gritted teeth, trying to stay conscious.

“Get out here and help me teach this bitch a lesson.”

The voice sounds thick and winded and realization grinds into place through the pounding in his head— _NO_.

“He said wait.” 

But their feet are moving to the door and—“won’t mind if we soften her up a bit”—and— _no no NO_.

He tries to stagger upright—to do what, who knows—but there’s blood in his eyes and spots across his vision and his knee is throbbing with its own hot sun of agony and as soon as he gets his feet under him the room slides sideways.

The door slams and locks behind him and he’s alone.

He scoots frantically over to the door and when he presses his ear against it he hears, “Think you’re clever, bitch?” and then a thud, the smack of fists and a grunt as someone drives the breath out of her. He hopes they are only beating her.

 _Focus, think_ , he tells himself through the pounding of his heart and the breath-stealing buzz of panic.

There are tools on a table across the room, a crude collection of things that can hurt. There’s a knife. Yes, good.

He uses the wall to push himself upright, leaning heavily on his good leg, biting down on his split lip and hoping the sharp pain will keep him from passing out. He’s dizzy, but he can stand, and easing weight onto his bad knee hurts, but it doesn’t give out.

Furiosa gives a single sharp cry that he feels like physical pain.

He takes half a dozen shaky steps toward the table before the rope around his hands jerks taught behind him. He staggers and spins and realizes they’ve tied the end of the rope around his hands to some kind of bar on the wall. He’d somehow missed that.

He gets down on the ground, and the pain of going from standing to kneeling makes his eyes water, but if he lies flat and stretches out his good leg he can just hook the tip of his boot around the leg of the table.

He’s sure they hear the crash when he pulls it over, scattering things rusty and pointy and heavy, but if it brings them back to him and away from her he doesn’t care.

The knife skids across the floor, and if he turns he can plant his foot on it and slide it toward him and— _there_. His hands are scrabbling up the cold blade from the floor and turning it around so he can saw at the ropes binding his wrists.

Then, a _scream_ from the other side of the door that makes him jump. But it’s not her.

It’s a man, screaming the high desperate screams of someone permanently maimed. There’s a scuffle and commotion and a hard _thunk_ , then a second male voice howls, and in both of them he hears agony and _fear_.

“Stop fucking around and help me!” one of them wails, and he can’t help smiling just a little. But then there’s a sick heavy thud that wipes the smile off his face.

The rope gives, the tension against his wrists released all at once. He claws his hands loose of the rope, grabs the knife and staggers to his feet.

A second to lean against the door. At least one man is still screaming, and he can hear the tromp of their boots moving away from him, and then the door to the outside room slams behind them.

_Now._

These rooms were not meant for holding prisoners. A few whacks at the doorknob with the pipe they beat him with and it breaks off. A slide of the knife into the lock and a wiggle just so and it pops open and he’s out.

He’s not prepared for the sight of her, and for a second brain and heart and guts all freeze up. Because there’s blood, so much blood around her face, and spatters and ropes of it all around where she lies on the floor, and they’ve pulled her pants down to her knees.

He shakes himself and runs to her, and he doesn’t even feel the pain when he kneels down, doesn’t feel much of anything except the hammering of his heart everywhere, and dimly he registers that he’s shaking so badly he has to use both hands to steady the knife enough to cut the ropes above her elbows.

She stirs. The last punch must have just dazed. “Hey,” he says, a trembling hand on her shoulder.

“M’okay,” she mutters through blood. She rolls onto her elbows with a stifled gasp of pain, and his hands reach for her reflexively. “Ribs,” she grits out. “I’ll live.”

“Did they—?” His mouth tastes like copper.

“Tried.” He doesn’t have to finish the question. “I bit someone’s ear off. Kicked another one in the balls pretty hard.” She hacks and spits out a huge mouthful of blood, and a bit of tooth comes with it. She pushes herself up onto her knees one-handed. “Not much time.”

She shoves herself to her feet and he’s scrambling to support her without hurting her. She leans back against the wall and pulls her pants up, teeth gritting any time she has to bend her torso. “Get my arm.”

Her prosthetic and body armor are on a table across the room. He helps her wrap the armor around her waist—“Tight,” she hisses—and strap the prosthetic back on.

His hands are still shaking and he fumbles with the straps. There is so much blood on her face and neck, and the image of her on the floor keeps flashing in front of his eyes—

“Max.” She must notice, because her flesh hand is on his chin, making him look at her. “M’okay. You’re okay. Right?” He swallows hard and nods.

They both hear it at the same time: the thunder of footsteps coming down a staircase somewhere nearby. Their torturers coming back with reinforcements, no doubt.

Without speaking they position themselves on either side of the door. She has the small sharp knife and a metal fist; he has the pipe and a simmering bubble of blind rage under his skin.

She puts an ear against the door, holds up five flesh fingers and a metal digit. Six. Six is easy enough between the two of them.

When they burst through the door it’s a melee, easy targets and yet more blood on the floor. The one with the bloody cloth wrapped around where his ear used to be ends up on Max’s side of the fight, and Max makes sure he gets a pipe in the face, once, twice, five times, he loses count, but there’s not much face left when he’s finished.

“Max.” Her voice pulls him back to himself. She’s trying to pull the heavy door closed against the weight of a dead body.

He swipes blood and bone chips off his face and goes to help her with the door.

She leans against the wall for a minute, streaked with sweat and gore, gritting her teeth and fighting the pain in her ribs. “Fucking amateurs,” she hisses. She spits blood at the nearest body.

He can’t even feel his knee anymore. Pushes away thoughts of what it’ll feel like once the adrenaline wanes.

He collects every weapon he can find from the bodies and they divide them up. “Let’s get out of here,” she pants.

They’re cautious stepping out the door, but the hallway is empty and quiet. “No idea where we are,” she whispers.

“Me either. First floor?” She nods. He has no good sense of how much time has passed, but at least up there they might have the sun to orient them.

The dark maw of the stairwell is ahead of them, past a junction in the corridor. He’s almost at the stairs when Furiosa stops, peering down the hallway. A faint light flickers against a distant wall. Firelight.

“Furi—”

She holds up a hand for silence and creeps down the hall toward the light, and he can only follow.

 

The hallway ends at a cavernous room, and Max can hear men’s voices and smell fire and booze and some kind of food. When he peers around the corner he sees a group of them around a fire burning in some sort of metal drum, drinking and laughing, apparently unaware of the carnage just down the hall.

Furiosa presses silently against the wall, ready to fight, and he doesn’t know why; she isn’t stupid; they should slip out quietly now while they have the chance. 

Then he sees the women. Or girls; it’s hard to tell how old they are under all the dirt. One has dark skin and hair twisted into thick braids; the other has hair the color of sand and is so thin he can see her clavicles jutting out in the shadows from the firelight. She’s carrying a heavy pot of some kind of soup around the circle, and the way she flinches when one of them squeezes her ass in passing tells him all he needs to know.

Furiosa is dead still against the wall, an animal poised to attack.

He does a quick count around the circle. Ten. Ten is not too many if they have the element of surprise.

Two more mouths will mean half the water and food on the journey back. They can make it if they’re careful, he thinks.

He presses the biggest gun he collected from downstairs into her hand, and tucks the extra clip into her pocket.

She waits until the girl with the soup moves out of the circle, somewhere into the shadows at the back of the room. “You go left,” she whispers. “I’ll go right.”

She gets three headshots in before they even know what’s happening. The gunfire is cacophonous in the empty space.

 

She finds the two women huddled in a shadowy corner after they’re done killing. They flinch away from her and she realizes she probably looks terrifying, gore-streaked and humming with the sick pleasure of violence. She wipes some of the blood off her face.

“Hey,” she ventures, keeping her voice low and even. “It’s okay. We can help you.”

Neither of them move.

“We have a car. We can take you home, if you know how to get there.”

“No home,” the one with dark skin and braids mutters. “All dead.”

Furiosa remembers the women who would sometimes make their way to the Green Place, broken and scarred, and how they would always be taken in, taught something useful if they didn’t already know, guns or healing or harvesting or bike repair.

“You can come with us, if you like. Where we’re from…it’s safe. You won’t be hurt there.”

The one with light hair and pale blue eyes is still cowering, but Braids looks warily curious.

“Are there…do you have children?” she says, because she has to ask. Blue-Eyes shakes her head violently.

“They sell them,” Braids says quietly. Which Furiosa supposes is better than eating them, but not by much.

Behind her, Max is salvaging anything of value, wrapping everything useful in a blanket one of them was sitting on. He yanks his jacket off a dead body, growls to himself at the bloodstains on it.

“Can you show us the fastest way out of here?”

Braids nods.

 

The two women lead them to the nearest stairway. Blue-Eyes is shaking, but she holds the torch out in front of them. Max is limping badly, and when he struggles on the stairs Braids hoists the bag of salvage over her thin back without complaint.

Max gives in and starts leaning on Furiosa halfway up the stairs, one hand braced on the wall. By the time they make it back to the Interceptor he is white-faced, but he shakes off her offers to drive.

There is not really a back seat, but the women fold themselves in between the supplies and reserve fuel tank and Max hits the gas.

 

They stop at sunset, when he’s satisfied they’ve put enough distance between them and the city.

“S’not a lot,” Max says as he hands out the evening rations of dried fruit and lizard jerky, but they look happy to be eating anything. “Get more when we can hunt.”

He has the medical kit out and he gestures toward the blue-eyed woman. “Should do something about her wrists.” She has nasty scabs, like she was bound too tightly for too long.

“I can do it,” the other woman says. “I know how.” She takes the kit and then offers, “I’m Magda. She’s Vale.”

“Max.” He only hesitates for a second. He nods toward Furiosa, standing guard leaning against the car, her rifle pointed at the sand. “She’s Furiosa.”

He can see the way they look at her already, a little fear but mostly awe. “Place we’re going…she helps run it. Safe there.”

“Thank you,” Magda says softly. “Thank her too?”

 

They clean each other’s wounds by kerosene lamp in the growing darkness. The desert is quiet around them, but neither of them feels easy enough to light a fire.

Max has bruises already blooming all over his sides and back, but the cuts on his face are not as bad as they could have been. She doesn’t want to think about the knee. She ties a scarf over it as tight as she can and hopes that will help keep the swelling down.

She has a split lip and a bloody nose, and plenty of bruises of her own, and pain in her ribs that spikes with every breath, but most of the blood on her face and neck is from other people. He wipes it away so carefully, and presses a bit of his scarf with disinfectant on it against the cut on her lip, and then he’s pressing his face against her neck, his fingers clutching at her belts, and he doesn’t make a sound but she can feel him shaking.

She encloses him in the cautious circle of her arms and whispers, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” until the panicky breaths coming out of him even out again.

She wishes his hands could wipe away the sense-memory that keeps playing in her head, of the grubby hand squirming between her thighs, trying to force them open in the seconds it had taken her to push herself from _freeze_ to _fight_ and clamp her teeth down on an ear.

Just another thing to push down out of sight. Add it to the list.

 

They sleep outside, settled down against the wheel well, the cooling heat of the engine at their backs. Both to give the women curled up in the car some privacy and, she thinks, because he knows she sleeps a little better under the open stars.

“I’ll take first watch,” he says, his finger looped over the trigger-guard of the shotgun resting on his thigh. “Wanna lie down?”

She shakes her head. “Up. Case we have to move.” She learned early the agony of moving from lying down to sitting up with broken ribs.

He nestles her against him and wraps an arm around her, and pulls the blanket up over both of them, making sure to keep the shotgun free outside it.

Now that the adrenaline has faded she is _exhausted_ , bone-weary and feeling every cut and bruise and the dull repetitive stab in her ribs every time she breathes. She leans her head against his shoulder.

“Know what you did back there,” he says after a while. “Distracting them. Shouldn’t have.”

She swallows. “Wasn’t just gonna sit there and listen to you scream.”

“Should’ve—” His throat clicks drily. “Let me take it. ‘F…something happened to you…” A brief spasm of his fingers against her waist.

“I knew what I was doing.” She curls a little closer against him under the blanket. “I get to protect you too.”

“Scared the shit outta me, when I came out and you were—” It comes out all at once in a rush of breath.

“I know,” she says. “But I’m okay.” She tries not to think, about how much of it had been luck, that there had been only four of them, that they'd underestimated her, that they'd put her on her back where she could bite and kick.

“They always think,” she murmurs, “that’s the thing you’ll do anything to avoid.” A bitter twitch of a smile. “Too late, assholes.”

He takes a breath like he’s about to say something, but then just exhales long and shaky and rests his cheek on the top of her head.

 

He hasn’t moved when she jerks awake a few hours later, still well before dawn, biting her lip hard at the slice of pain from her ribs.

“Ssh. You’re safe.” He rubs her back while she waits for her heart to stop pounding.

“Don’t stay up all night,” she says. “Wake me when you get tired.”

“Mm.”

 

When she opens her eyes next it’s dawn.

“You were supposed to wake me,” she murmurs against his shoulder.

“Couldn’t sleep. You needed it.”

“Let me drive a little while, then. You can sleep in the car.”

“Mm,” he agrees. He sleeps better inside the car anyway.

Getting to their feet is excruciating for both of them, but they each have the other to lean on.

“So,” Max says as he eases some weight onto his bad leg, “is there really a secret way into the Citadel?”

“Nah. That would be stupid.” She laughs and then immediately regrets it, a hand over her ribs. “There’s only a secret way out.”


End file.
